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The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Sadly not the trashy gossip fest I was in the mood for. I wanted either another hundred pages discussing the court's role in the political system and propounding a new theory of case analysis, or I wanted some juicy judicial sexploits. Sadly, I got neither. The "revelations" in this book are nothing new if you pay a little attention to the court – Scalia and Ginsburg were besties, Thomas has a bizarre and alarming worldview, etc.

Still, the lay reader would probably enjoy this as a portrait of personalities, and for the capsule histories of momentous cases from the Reagan years to about 2006. (Though this book did lead me to discover that I can still recite footnote 4 of carolene Products from memory, which, honestly, I'd be happier not knowing that about myself).

Anyway, this didn't change my opinions of anyone. You don't catch me agreeing with Scalia very often, but I am in complete sympathy with his opinion of Kennedy. I remember when I was putting together my constitutional law notes – I had this beautiful 70 page outline with case holdings and capsule dissents, and at the end of every statement of a Kennedy holding I wrote, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. My feelings on O'connor are complicated, and I suspect Toobin would say the same, so those sections worked well for me. And of course my opinions on Roberts and Alito were formed realtime – I actually worked on a team that vetted the short list of nominees that leaked that summer for a civil rights organization, which sounds roughly a billionty times sexier than it actually was.

So this was well researched and diverting, but ultimately inconsequential for me.




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